Are New Radical Right Voters ‘Welfare Populists’? Theoretical and Empirical discussions of the Concept of Welfare Populism

The recent literature on welfare attitudes, their social determinants, and their political consequences, makes a substantive use of the concept of welfare populism. This concept refers to a specific combination of two attitudes: egalitarianism and critical views of the Welfare state. Welfare populism is now largely empirically documented in national studies, and linked to radical right vote. However a reference to the notion of populism requires further theoretical discussion. The goal of this paper is to explore if the underlying theories and characteristics of populism can be applied to welfare attitudes. The first section of the paper considers the welfare state attitudes, and proposes a renewed conceptual frame: the ‘moral economy of the welfare state’. It is appropriate to study welfare state attitudes, since beliefs about the welfare state cannot be limited to their “economic utility”, and in this particular case, interest-based conceptions of the Welfare state. Of course, each moral economy is not a simple frame to explain beliefs and behaviours in a specific group, much less so in a nation. It is the product of different forces. The social, economic and moral perceived consequences of the Welfare state are at the foundation of its legitimacy. These three dimensions are constitutive of the moral economy of the Welfare state, its three faces. The second section draws from the theories of populism, and specifically from Margaret Canovan’s idea that it is in a gap, in the tension between different dimensions of democracy, that populism emerges and thrives. It is in the tension between the different dimensions of the moral economy of the Welfare state that welfare populism is rooted. The third section is a comparative empirical of welfare populism in Western Europe. It shows that, notwithstanding its cultural determinants, welfare populism is highly significant in New Radical Right vote.